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An IT industry analyst article published by SearchITOperations.

Infrastructure that supports big data comes from both the cloud and clusters. Enterprises can mix and match these seven infrastructure choices to meet their needs.

Mike Matchett

If enterprise IT has been slow to support big data analytics in production for the decade-old Hadoop, there has been a much faster ramp-up now that Spark is part of the overall package. After all, doing the same old business intelligence approach with broader, bigger data (with MapReduce) isn’t exciting, but producing operational time predictive intelligence that guides and optimizes business with machine precision is a competitive must-have.

With traditional business intelligence (BI), an analyst studies a lot of data and makes some hypotheses and a conclusion to form a recommendation. Using the many big data machine learning techniques supported by Spark’s MLlib, a company’s big data can dynamically drive operational-speed optimizations. Massive in-memory machine learning algorithms enable businesses to immediately recognize and act on inherent patterns in even big streaming data.

But the commoditization of machine learning itself isn’t the only new driver here. A decade ago, IT needed to stand up either a “baby” high performance computing cluster for serious machine learning or learn to write low-level distributed parallel algorithms to run on the commodity-based Hadoop MapReduce platform. Either option required both data science and exceptionally talented IT admins that could stand up and support massive physical scale-out clusters in production. Today there are many infrastructure options for big data clusters that can help IT deploy and support big data-driven applications.

Here are seven types of big data infrastructures for IT to consider, each with core strengths and differences:…(read the complete as-published article there)

(Excerpt from original post on the Taneja Group News Blog)

Clusters are the scale-out way to go in today’s data center. Why not try to architect an infrastructure that can grow linearly in capacity and/or performance? Well, one problem is that operations can get quite complex especially when you start mixing workloads and tenants on the same cluster. In vanilla big data solutions everyone can compete, and not always fairly, for the same resources. This is a growing problem in production environments where big data apps are starting to underpin key business-impacting processes.

An IT industry analyst article published by SearchStorage.

Whether driven by direct competition or internal business pressure, CIOs, CDOs and even CEOs today are looking to squeeze more value, more insight and more intelligence out of their data. They no longer can afford to archive, ignore or throw away data if it can be turned into a valuable asset. At face value, it might seem like a no-brainer — “we just need to analyze all that data to mine its value.” But, as you know, keeping any data, much less big data, has a definite cost. Processing larger amounts of data at scale is challenging, and hosting all that data on primary storage hasn’t always been feasible.

Historically, unless data had some corporate value — possibly as a history trail for compliance, a source of strategic insight or intelligence that can optimize operational processes — it was tough to justify keeping it. Today, thanks in large part to big data analytics applications, that thinking is changing. All of that bulky low-level bigger data has little immediate value, but there might be great future potential someday, so you want to keep it — once it’s gone, you lose any downstream opportunity.

To extract value from all that data, however, IT must not only store increasingly large volumes of data, but also architect systems that can process and analyze it in multiple ways.

(Excerpt from original post on the Taneja Group News Blog)

At this month’s Hadoop Summit 2015 I noted two big trends. One was the continuing focus on Spark as an expansion of the big data analytical ecosystem, with main sponsor Hortonworks (great show by the way!) and most vendors talking about how they support, interact, or deliver Spark in addition to Hadoop’s MapReduce. The other was a very noticeable direction shifting focus from trotting out ever more gee-whiz big data use cases towards talking about how to make it all work in enterprise production environments. If you ask me, this second trend is the bigger deal for IT folks to pay attention to.

An IT industry analyst article published by SearchStorage.

Big data sure is exciting to business folks, with all sorts of killer applications just waiting to be discovered. And you no doubt have a growing pile of data bursting the seams of your current storage infrastructure, with lots of requests to mine even more voluminous data streams. Haven’t you been collecting microsecond end-user behavior across all your customers and prospects, not to mention collating the petabytes of data exhaust from instrumenting your systems to the nth degree? Imagine the insight management would have if they could look at all that data at once. Forget about data governance, data management, data protection and all those other IT worries — you just need to land all that data in a relatively scale-cheap Hadoop cluster!

Seriously, though, big data lakes can meet growing data challenges and provide valuable new services to your business. By collecting a wide variety of data sets relevant to the business all in one place and enabling multi-talented analytics based on big data approaches that easily scale, many new data mining opportunities can be created. The total potential value of a data lake grows with the amount of useful data it holds available for analysis. And, one of the key tenets of big data and the big data lake concept is that you don’t have to create a master schema ahead of time, so non-linear growth is possible.

The enterprise data lakes or hub concept was first proposed by big data vendors like Cloudera and Hortonworks, ostensibly using vanilla scale-out HDFS-based commodity storage. But it just so happens that the more data you keep on hand, the more storage of all kinds you will need. Eventually, all corporate data is likely to be considered big data. However, not all of that corporate data is best hosted on a commodity scale-out HDFS cluster.

So, today, traditional storage vendors are signing up to the big data lakes vision. From a storage marketing perspective, it seems like data lakes are the new cloud. “Everyone needs a data lake. How can you compete without one (or two or three)?” And there are a variety of enterprise storage options for big data, including enterprise storage, that can provide remote storage that acts like HDFS, Hadoop virtualization that can translate other storage protocols into HDFS, and scalable software-defined storage options.

Today at #snyc18 learning about the latest in #serverless. Opportunity is huge (iRobot is 100% serverless and loving it @ben11kehoe ), but not a panacea, lots of work to do to build up full production applications yet according to Kelsey Hightower (google) @kelseyhightower .